Seeing Things in High Resolution (Part 1)

The 123rd Dentsu Inc. Design Talk, held at Dentsu Hall on September 22, featured a dialogue between Takafumi Horie, founder of SNS, and Kensuke Yamamoto of Sumally. The theme was "Seeing Things in High Resolution." What are the perspectives of these two individuals developing services at the forefront of society? We present this in two parts.

Sumally: The Encyclopedia of Things in the 2010s

Yamamoto: I recently had the chance to talk with Mr. Horie on "HORIEMON.COM. " Let's start with introductions. After graduating, I worked at Dentsu Inc. for about two years. Then, I became a magazine editor at Condé Nast's "GQ JAPAN" before launching the service "Sumally." Sumally is a service that connects people through the things they love. Users often call it a "desire-stimulating SNS." We developed it driven by the desire to create an "encyclopedia of things" for this era. We believed that an encyclopedia for the 2010s should include information on who "Wants" an item, who "Has" it, and who "Sells" it.

Sumally has 1.6 million registered items, enabling profiling of both existing and potential customers for every single item. We call this an evolved POS system and aim to develop it into a product development and sales business that provides user attributes and preference information. One of Sumally's missions is to restructure the commerce system. Current e-commerce platforms let sellers list what they want to sell, while Amazon lists everything that sells well and even allows non-Amazon sellers to participate. Amazon changed the e-commerce rule from "list to sell" to a structure where buying and selling happen on the list itself. What we aim for is the next step beyond that: e-commerce that makes buyers happy. We're driven by the desire to build on that structure and achieve innovative progress in user profiling, personalization, and recommendations.

Smartphones aren't "phones"

Horie: I returned to society last March. For the past seven to eight years, I've been continuously working on developing rocket engines. Currently, demand for small satellite launches is growing, and private rocket development is booming. This is actually related to the proliferation of smartphones. As the precision of components built into smartphones increased, they became usable as rocket sensors, dramatically reducing development costs by a factor of 100 or even 1000. We're even seeing rockets used in advertising campaigns. We also ran a campaign last year on November 11th, "Pocky & Pretz Day." We launched a rocket in Pocky and Pretz colors at 11:11:11 AM to an altitude of 1,111 meters. It was a huge success. Space holds dreams. We plan to continue our rocket-related projects going forward.

Then there's application development specialized for smartphones. What struck me most upon returning to work was the incredible speed at which smartphones were spreading. LINE became ubiquitous, completely changing the players in just two years. I believe the key to LINE's success was offering a service specifically tailored for smartphones. People who had only ever developed for PCs or the web probably didn't notice that. Smartphones aren't just "phones." Think of them as high-performance UNIX computers. And they're connected to broadband. It's an amazing environment. From now on, applications must be specifically designed for smartphones. Conversely, you don't need to think about PCs anymore. Billions of smartphones will be sold worldwide, but PCs? At best, hundreds of millions. That's a whole different order of magnitude.

The "Talk Live App 755 (Nanago-go)" I worked on is also gaining traction. We created it through a joint venture with CyberAgent. To the people in this venue, you don't need to listen to my talk—just download and use it right now (laughs). Simply put, it's a chat app where you can peek into live talks by celebrities and even join the conversation. We now have hundreds of thousands of users, with Yasushi Akimoto being the most popular. Toru Kenjo, President of Gentosha, also uses it, leading to some incredibly substantive editor talks. This even sparked a resurgence in popularity for Mr. Kenjo's book, The Disease Called Editor, causing Amazon to run out of stock and leading to its first reprint in seven years.

※The second part of the interview will be updated on Saturday, November 8.

You can also read the interview here on AdTie!

Planning & Production: Dentsu Inc. Human Resources Department, Aki Kanahara